Transport Committee on June 10th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

Thank you, Ms. Fox and High Commissioner Goodale.

We're now going to move on to the NDP.

Mr. Bachrach, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses here today.

I'd like to begin with some questions for High Commissioner Goodale.

Let me begin by offering my congratulations on your new role. We really appreciate your being with the committee today to answer our questions.

You mentioned in your introductory remarks, High Commissioner, that even now that you've submitted your report, your role as a special adviser continues. I wonder if you could characterize what shape that role is taking, now that your report has been submitted. How much capacity will you be dedicating to that role, and what are some of your objectives moving forward?

[Ralph Goodale]

The idea is for me to continue to be available to the families on one side and to the government on the other, to ensure that the communication remains strong and robust and that the relationship that has been built up over the last year and a half is carefully nurtured.

I would mention, though, one new and very impressive member of the team, who was just announced maybe a week or 10 days ago, and that is Professor Payam Akhavan, who is an acknowledged human rights expert. He has an international reputation. He's an Iranian-Canadian of great academic distinction and legal distinction in Canada. We're very lucky to have him as a citizen of our country. He's a very wise counsellor and a very strategic thinker in how you navigate all of the international agencies, rules, procedures and conventions to get justice properly served at the end of the day. He has now just been engaged as a senior special adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the PS752 case specifically. I look forward to working in close concert with Professor Akhavan to offer ideas, counsel and advice to assist in this endeavour going forward.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you for the response, High Commissioner.

Iran has indicted 10 officials whom it holds responsible—

[Ralph Goodale]

We think.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

—for the shooting down.

Yes.

Do you accept that these 10 officials are the ones who are responsible, or is this a case of the blame being placed on junior officials so that responsibility can be avoided by more senior officials who probably should have taken additional actions to secure the airspace for civil aviation?

[Ralph Goodale]

That's the dilemma, Mr. Bachrach, in a nutshell: We don't know. The process by which these people were identified, investigated, indicted, charged and tried, if they have been.... We don't know what process.... We heard first that it was six. Then it was something more than six. Then it was 10. It's all [Inaudible—Editor] box. The judicial system is entirely opaque. Therefore, how can you ever know if justice has been properly served?

When you're dealing with a regime that does not have an independent air-accident investigation system.... That is the case in Iran. It's an integrated part of the government; it's not an independent investigative body like our Transportation Safety Board, for example. Kathy Fox and her team are entirely independent of the Government of Canada, but in Iran that's not the case. The investigation is, in effect, a part of their department of transport. Similarly, the judicial system is entirely opaque. You don't know who's being charged with what, or what the process is to determine their guilt or innocence.

The short answer to your question is that when you have that kind of a regime, you're always going to have serious doubts about whether you're ever getting the truth.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, High Commissioner.

The Iranian government has offered to provide compensation to the families. That offer was rejected. Could you speak to why that offer of compensation was deemed insufficient?

I believe you spoke to reparations earlier, but perhaps you could confirm that the government will be seeking compensation for the victims' families.

[Ralph Goodale]

On two occasions the Iranian government has offered compensation. One was in the days immediately after the truth was revealed. You remember the Prime Minister's news conference, at which he indicated that intelligence made it abundantly clear what had happened, that PS752 had been shot down by Iranian missiles. In the wake of that disclosure by the Prime Minister, Iran admitted its responsibility, said there would be an investigation, said there would be prosecutions and said there would be compensation. That was useful. That was a step forward in the first few days after the incident happened.

Earlier this year, they unilaterally came forward with an offer, if you will—at least a speculated offer—of a certain amount of money per victim.

The point is that they don't get to decide compensation unilaterally. They have committed an internationally wrongful act. The international conventions and the traditions of international law will say that they are obliged to engage in negotiations with the injured countries. I specified earlier what countries those are. It's those negotiations that will determine the appropriate amount of compensation.

Yes, the negotiations for reparations will seek appropriate compensation right up to the high standards of the world. We will insist on that being properly recognized. It will come out of a negotiating process. It's not something Iran can dictate unilaterally.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, Mr. Bachrach.

Thank you, Mr. Goodale.

We're now going to go to our second round. First up, for the Conservatives, is Mr. Shipley.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'll start with Mr. Goodale.

First of all, thank you for being here today. It's nice to meet you, Mr. Goodale. It's too bad it's not in person, but I think someday soon we'll be back to that.

Mr. Goodale, in your opening remarks—I'm going to quote you—you mentioned the “horrific behaviour” of Iran. Just to get it on the record, obviously, other than the blatant issue of shooting down flight 752, could you expand a little more on what you mean by that, so we can get a clear indication of some of your knowledge on this?

[Ralph Goodale]

Much of that behaviour, Mr. Shipley, is laid out in some considerable detail in the report I filed. I won't get into all that detail, but I'll give you a few examples.

Iran was launching missile attacks at U.S. positions in Iraq in the early morning of January 8, 2020. The Iranians say they conducted a risk assessment—this is in their final report—to determine whether any particular action should be taken to protect civil aviation in Iran. They took some actions to control air travel in the far west part of the country, where it borders Iraq, but the air space over the bulk of Iran had no restrictions or limitations whatsoever. The only change they made was to have the military involved in decisions as to whether or not a flight would be cleared to take off. That's the only safety measure they implemented. Otherwise, they said, the skies over Tehran were safe as normal on that morning.

That was clearly a flawed risk assessment. Obviously, they did not anticipate the circumstances that occurred, and yet they say in their report that if they had to do it over again, they would come to the same conclusion. Clearly, that was an incredibly incompetent behaviour to produce a risk assessment that was so fundamentally flawed.

Then, knowing the risk, knowing that they had launched missiles, knowing that retaliation was expected, knowing that they had positioned those mobile missile launchers around Tehran, including by the airport, they didn't bother to close the airspace over the airport. They didn't bother to alert the airline companies to the fact that there was danger in those skies and that there were missile operators in a position, quite literally, with their fingers over the triggers, ready and able to shoot down civilian aircraft.

That's just a bit of the flavour of this horrendous conduct. They were, in my opinion, incredibly incompetent. They were reckless, and they showed a wanton disregard for human life.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Goodale. You obviously have a wealth of knowledge on this file.

Knowing what you know, and given the breadth of knowledge that you have on this, do you feel that Canada should or could impose more sanctions on Iran under any federal or international legislation?

[Ralph Goodale]

I think the government needs to keep all of these options open and pursue this whole issue in a strategic, step-by-step manner going forward, hopefully not alone. We need to work in concert with other like-minded countries and to meticulously not rule out any potential measure to hold Iran to account. The critical thing at the moment is to make sure the reparation negotiations get properly started, because that's another forum in which we'll pursue the truth from Iran. While that is going ahead, Canada should be raising this issue at ICAO, in other UN agencies, and through every channel and means to make sure the world does not forget.

Let me put together a troika of events that show the slippery slope you can get on. Back in 2014, there was the MH17 that was shot down over the Russian border. That prompted a series of reflections by ICAO and other bodies about what you could do to improve air safety. Five and a half years later, PS752 was shot down by Iran. About a month ago, there was the Ryanair incident, in which an aircraft was taken in what appears to have been a state-sponsored hijacking. The world needs to take this seriously. There is no reason for anyone to believe the skies over Tehran are any safer today than they were in January of 2020.

Canada, with the rest of the world co-operating and collaborating, needs to make it abundantly clear that we aren't going to forget—and we're not going to let the world forget—that 55 Canadian citizens, 30 permanent residents of Canada and another 53 or 54 innocent people with direct connections to Canada lost their lives on that horrendous morning. That is something Canadians will never forget.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, High Commissioner.

Thank you, Mr. Shipley.

We're now going to move on to the Liberals. Ms. Jaczek, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for your testimony, which has been extremely clear and very forthright, as well.

My community was horrified to learn that all three members of the Rahimi family perished in the shooting down of PS752. At the vigil that the Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville held for them, it was really obvious they had become such well-loved members of the community. It was incredibly moving to hear residents in my community speak about such exemplary Canadian citizens being shot down.

My first question is for Ms. Fox. You intrigued me in one thing that you said, that eight previous flights had left Tehran airport prior to PS752. Did you ask—and I'm sure you did—how the radar system somehow misaligned just prior to 752? Was there any explanation of why others had left the airport safely and this particular flight was shot down?

[Kathleen Fox]

Mr. Chair, to be clear, the eight aircraft departed after Iran launched missiles into Iraq, and Iran's report suggests a scenario in which the radar had been offline for a certain period of time. We were not able to obtain any additional information to validate that, one way or the other.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

In terms of ICAO's annex 13, Ms. Fox, if you had the ability to change the conditions around investigations, what would they look like?

[Kathleen Fox]

Mr. Chair, I'm going to ask Mr. Tasker to take that question, because he was the one who presented the paper at ICAO last month.

[Ewan Tasker]

As mentioned, what we proposed in our working paper is that the Accident Investigation Panel, which is a panel of worldwide experts in accident investigation, come together to answer those questions.

We have ideas—I have ideas; Ms. Fox has ideas; our team has ideas—about ways to bolster independence, to bolster credibility and to bolster transparency. There are many methods to do that. There are different grades of who gets accredited representative status, etc., possibly, so there are many ideas of things we can do to help that, but what we determined was that it would be best if those ideas came from that group of experts. If they get pushed by us singularly, they may not get as much traction and have as much success.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

To High Commissioner Goodale, in terms of our diplomatic efforts, is there any danger in Canada's using rhetoric that might be too inflammatory? I really appreciate your forthrightness today, but how are you balancing the risks?

[Ralph Goodale]

That's part of the art of diplomacy. As someone who was actively involved in the political life of Canada for some 45 or 50 years, I'm still on a learning curve of transitioning from politics to diplomacy, but I think it is important to be absolutely clear about what we feel about the culpability that's involved in this situation. Strong language is important. It has to be accurate, but I think we have to leave no doubt that Canadians feel very strongly about the deaths of the 138 people who were attached in one way or another to our country.

Second, I think we have to work very hard to make sure, whether it's on the issue of sanctions, the negotiations for reparations or the changes that we would want to see made in ICAO and so forth, that we're not moving unilaterally. We need to have the world community come to the same conclusions we have, so we have to be building a coalition.

In this regard, I want to pay tribute to foreign minister Marc Garneau, who, at the meeting of G7 ministers of foreign affairs about a month ago, made sure that PS752 was on the agenda and that the G7 ministers of foreign affairs collectively condemned what had happened and made it clear they did not believe that any transparent or comprehensive investigation worth its name had been completed in this case. In other words, Iran had not done what it was obliged to do according to the international community.

You need to pursue all the steps in the proper order, making sure you don't mess up your jurisdiction, ultimately, to get into the International Court of Justice, if that's what this takes. I believe that Canada needs to be vigorous in leading this effort internationally and bringing others along with us.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Vance Badawey]

Thank you, High Commissioner.

Thank you, Ms. Jaczek.

We're now going to move on to the Bloc. We have Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

You have the floor for two and a half minutes.